Boom Bip, a Cincinnati producer/DJ (roughly in that order), comes from a long line of twisted hip-hop mentalists, stretching from
Biz Markie to
Company Flow to
Kid Koala. And listeners expecting something special from an unknown granted a licensing to the quality-control experts at Warp won't be disappointed by Seed to Sun; it's experimental hip-hop being done on a level reached by few producers out there. More experimental, rangier, and lighter than any
Co-Flow material, but more producer-driven than
Kid Koala's records, the album encompasses analog electronics, beat-heavy experimental techno, turntablist scratching, and dozens of mostly unrecognizable samples (one strain that briefly emerges from the soup:
B.J. Thomas' "Everybody's Out of Town"). Surprisingly, Seed to Sun is also very melodic, audible even when
Boom Bip layers dense beats and samples over his tracks, as on "Closed Shoulders." For "The Unthinkable," one of the few vocal tracks, guest
Buck 65 comes off like a countrified rapper produced by
El-P. The other top-notch vocal comes from
Dose One (from Anticon), prefacing a
Cypress Hill-goes-pop chorus on "Mannequin Hand Trapdoor I Reminder" with some paranoid musings. Nothing against
El-P; he's a great producer, and deserves most of the hype he's gotten. It's just that Seed to Sun does what he does so much better. ~ John Bush